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Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

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Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#101

Post by Nasrudith »

Decentralization first came to mind as a "try to pawn off the hosting costs" as a motivation but I can see trying legal zones to try to adapt to the multiple conflicting legal requirements and demands because countries would never agree on "neutral international business rules". It is certainly rational and often of questionable legal fairness to expect otherwise.

I am not happy with the balkanization involved in that concept - part of the beauty of the internet is a disregard for the globe's petty fiefdoms and their ability to literally divide and conquer.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#102

Post by jasonzemos »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

I'd rather see interest in Matrix than ActivityPub.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#103

Post by UserIsUnused »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #50
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #46

I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that... ...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems. In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happen…

“Free speech” twitter alternatives exist, and invariably turn into cesspools (see gab.ai).

I believe they turn into those cesspools because only people that feel outside of mainstream networks due to bans and stuff, end up there.

It would be a different scenario if it was the big network that supported free speech instead of a new ban reactionary network

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#104

Post by edf13 »

ilaksh wrote: post #96
edf13 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not going to work.... There are egos at stake here!

I don't think its mostly about egos but rather about money. Something like Ethereum offers a potential profit model which ActivityPub does not. Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.

It's been tried before on Eth... can't recall the name now but the biggest issue is the Gas price/cost to post any update.

As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#105

Post by mcbits »

Angostura wrote: post #45
kick wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon isn't decentralized, it's federated, and ActivityPub is a terrible protocol (that Mastodon frequently disobeys).

It’s not clear to me what ‘decentralized’ means her, if not federated. Perhaps you could explain?

The Web and email are both federated and thus theoretically decentralized, but in practice they're highly centralized. Yet another federated protocol (sitting on top of an already centralized federated protocol) is probably not a reliable path to decentralization.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#106

Post by panarky »

ActivityPub? Who cares about what JSON schema gets adopted?

Much more interesting is the why, not the how.

#1 reason to decentralize:

"Centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people."

#2 reason:

"The value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet."

#3 reason:

"social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health."

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#107

Post by ndarwincorn »

gkoberger wrote: post #99
OzzyB wrote: post #10

“There's an old saying on the Internet — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

I know it seems like Bush forgot the quote, but in reality he likely realized halfway through he didn't want a soundbite of him saying "Shame on me".

This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time.

Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#108

Post by M2Ys4U »

mactavish88 wrote: post #30
phoe-krk wrote: post #21

Isn't this called ActivityPub and hasn't this been working well for the last couple of years?

Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization? Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard? Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk…

> Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?

Dorsey follows the Mastodon twitter account - he knows about it.

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#109

Post by mactavish88 »

kick wrote: post #82

To those of you pushing for ActivityPub: Webber's trashed it (the initial author) and is working on a way to mitigate the problems of it by implementing incompatible changes, the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (Pleroma). AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped cont…

Sure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018).

I'm not a Mastodon developer, nor have I developed with it, but surely there are learnings there that could potentially be contributed back to the W3C to make ActivityPub better (including making it more rigorously spec'd).

The people at the W3C are not gods - they're human beings just like the rest of us. Why not get involved in the conversation there?

The only genuine reason I can think of to split away from the ActivityPub effort to build a completely different protocol would be if the W3C's working group on ActivityPub is filled with such toxic politics that it's impossible to make any progress on making the spec better. (That's been the only reason I could see in the past when I've been part of protocol standardization efforts).

Without evidence of that, however, I'd say that it's far better for the community to get involved in making the existing spec better. Robust debate (supported by evidence, such as that which Mastodon's built up) is incredibly valuable to the community as a whole.

Also, it's incredibly valuable from a political decentralization perspective to have as neutral a party as possible facilitating the standardization efforts, to minimize the risk of Big Tech shaping standards in ways that would suit them financially (and potentially against the interests of the average internet user).

[0] - https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/

[1] - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the...

Re: Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media

#110

Post by rhcom2 »

buboard wrote: post #69
d--b wrote: post #13

How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation? It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.

I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship. Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity. Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaint…

> It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity.

Does it make sense business-wise? What business will want to be on a system that has no moderation? It's just asking for your brand to be accidentally or intentionally associated with undesirable things.

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